The aerospace industry has experienced several technological advances in computing power and techniques, in positioning and surveillance (e.g., Global Positioning System, GPS; ADS-B), and in avionics capabilities (e.g., head-up displays, HUDs; and, electronic moving maps, EMMs). Despite these advances, some aircraft operations continue to be conducted relatively inefficiently.
One of the most inefficient operations is aircraft surface operation. The major reason for this is that aircraft surface operation procedures today are generally the same as they were in the early 1940's, during the beginning years of commercial passenger travel. Admittedly, these traditional procedures do work well in most cases. That is, when the airport surfaces are not congested and visibility is good. However, aircraft traffic volume has increased significantly over the years. As such, it has become increasingly desirable to develop technologies that could improve aircraft surface operations even under poor visibility conditions.
One of the more recent technological developments is a system that generates and renders an airport surface map on a flight deck display upon aircraft touchdown. In some embodiments, the airport map is rendered as an out-the window view on a normal, clear day, and may additionally include identifiers on aircraft pathways such as runways, taxiways and/or aprons. However, the integrity of these systems may depend largely on the integrity and accuracy of the aircraft global positioning system (GPS), the Inertial Navigation System (INS), and/or the geographic feature databases. Insufficient integrity or accuracy from one or more of these navigation aids may cause inaccuracies in the rendered airport map.
One other technological advancement that has been looked to for potentially increasing aircraft ground surface operation efficiency is in the area of enhanced vision systems (EVS). This is because a certified EVS provides navigation cues to pilots during approach and landing irrespective of weather condition. For ground surface operations, navigation guidance information extracted from on-board sensors would need to be used to supplement synthetic images, and assist the pilot in performing integrity checks during poor, low visibility weather conditions. However, such solutions would rely on the development of robust image processing algorithms to handle relatively poor contrast images and provide accurate navigation cue estimates. This development could be fairly costly and time-consuming.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method of increasing the efficiency of aircraft ground surface operations that does not depend largely upon the integrity or accuracy of navigation aids and/or does not rely on the development of potentially complex, non-real-time image processing algorithms. The present invention addresses at least one or more of these needs.